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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology publication tuberculosis

New publication: reply to letters about CRyPTIC ECOFF/ECVs

Last year, the CRyPTIC Consortium published a detailed study establishing epidemiological cutoff values (ECOFFs or ECVs) so that it could binarise the minimum inhibitory concentrations it measured for 13 antibiotics for over 15,000 samples of M. tuberculosis collected worldwide. This paper attracted two letters to the editor of the journal, Eur Resp J, which you […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology publication research tuberculosis

New publication: determining novel mechanisms of bedaquiline resistance

A new paper with Lindsay Sonnenkalb as first-author has just been published in The Lancet Microbe. It is a collaboration between a  number of groups, led by Stefan Niemann and in it we evolved resistance to bedaquiline in vitro. Sequencing revealed 265 genetic variants with 250 affecting Rv0678, which is the transcription regulator of mmpL5, […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology publication research tuberculosis

New preprint: Including minor alleles improves fluoroquinolone resistance prediction

Fluoroquinolones are used to treat both normal and drug resistant tuberculosis and therefore being able to work out if an infection is resistant or not to fluoroquinolones is very important. Sequencing the genome of an infection is increasingly used to rapidly return which antibiotics could be used to treat a patient with tuberculosis. Genetics-based approaches […]

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antimicrobial resistance citizen science clinical microbiology publication research tuberculosis

New publication: BashTheBug works!

Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched in April 2017 on the Zooniverse platform. (Update on 19 July 2022: the final formatted version of the paper has been posted on eLife). Through BashTheBug we asked for volunteers to classify images of M. tuberculosis growing on a range […]

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antimicrobial resistance clinical microbiology computing group molecular dynamics publication research tuberculosis

New preprint: Predicting antibiotic resistance in complex protein targets

In this preprint, which Alice has been working on for several years, we show how alchemical free energy methods can predict whether an amino acid mutation confers resistance to an antitubercular, but only in cases where the change in binding free energy is large. This is mainly because the confidence limits on the change in […]

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antimicrobial resistance publication research tuberculosis

New Publication: Structure of MmpL3

Oliver Adams successfully elucidated the structure of the M. tuberculosis MmpL3 membrane transporter using cryo-EM and this has recently been published online in Structure. This was the main aim of his PhD studies in Simon Newstead‘s group in the Department of Biochemistry here in Oxford. It is an important protein structure since although other MmpL3 […]